SiteMesh Is Lovely

Aaron, my coworker, has a great post about SiteMesh vs. Tiles. The project that he's referring to is the one we've been working on together. SiteMesh is one of the tools that has made the project a joy so far.

I think Aaron's assessment is right on. However, I will clarify one thing with his statement about third party tag libraries. The problem wasn't that SiteMesh was filtering out the custom tags. The problem was that SiteMesh was filtering out the HTML/JavaScript generated by the Alphablox tag because it was in the "head" portion of the decorated JSP. To work around this, we set up a special decorator to put the Alphablox tag in the head of the decorator instead of relying on it being in the decorated page.

Like Aaron, I really like SiteMesh and hope to use it again on my future projects.